Terminal Velocity

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Terminal Velocity

One pressure suit. One parachute. 130,000 feet. Two skydivers are racing to push the envelope of the stratosphere - and survive smashing the sound barrier on their way back down to Earth.

As he approaches the edge of space, Rodd Millner is a dangling man. A helium balloon the size of a baseball infield tugs his open-air gondola straight up at a speed of 900 feet per minute. Strapped to a chair, constricted by a $3 million suit specially designed and built for the highest leap ever attempted, the aeronaut heads for the top of a 130,000-foot virtual diving platform. At that altitude, the balloon can go no higher, so he gets ready to cut loose and take a belly flop plunge. Within 60 seconds, he'll reach a speed of 1,000 mph, breaking the sound barrier without the propulsion of an engine or the protection of a vehicle. If Millner doesn't maintain perfect control of his limbs, he might go into a spin whose force would tear him apart. He could hit the ground in a half-dozen pieces.

In the final moments before the Great Leap Downward, Millner verifies his altitude with ground control. His jump physician, Dougal Watson, barks at him over a two-way radio, running through a preleap checklist. Altitude-sensor and parachute-release assemblies: armed. Safety harness: released. Life support: disconnected. Millner uses cold, stiff hands to switch over to the space suit's independent life-support system. Oxygen: functional. Heat: functional. (Good thing, too: He'll soon experience a 150-degree Fahrenheit drop in temperature.) Millner stands, feels heavy. His thermal underwear alone weighs 22 pounds; his total weight - with gear - is about 550. He gazes down through miles of stratosphere, an impervious deep indigo. He's positioned over his home country, Australia, which from here is just a wash of red. No roads, no patches of fields. The sun shimmers on the distant speck of the launch site.

Millner spots Ayers Rock, smack in the center of the continent. It's one of the world's largest natural monoliths, rising 1,142 feet from the desert floor with a circumference of about 6 miles, but from this height it's just a dark freckle. A year ago Millner told a US radio host that he'd picked the middle of Australia as a bull's-eye so he wouldn't "miss" his home country. Now he smirks, recalling the joke - has he suddenly become giddy? He's heard that at this altitude, you experience "breakaway syndrome" - sometimes you feel ecstatic, sometimes utterly detached and alone. Watson's voice snaps him out of it: "Have a good one, you lucky bastard."

Radio contact ceases. Millner focuses, inhales, and rolls forward. He has no sensation of falling. He turns on his back, sees the balloon shoot into the distance as he accelerates toward Mach 1. His stomach wilts. He vanishes beneath the gaze of God.

Call it extreme sport, extreme science, extreme everything. If all goes according to schedule - but with something like this, who the hell knows? - Millner will make his grandiose plunge next spring, bagging one of those maniac "firsts" that 99.9 percent of humanity would rather leave alone. And he's not the only person trying - Millner's project, called Space Dive, is in a me-first competition with US skydiving champion Cheryl Stearns, whose StratoQuest jump is currently slated to take place in April. The goal is clear and stark: No person has ever traveled this high in a balloon, let alone jumped from the edge of Earth's stratosphere protected only by daredevil togs and a parachute. Both teams plan to marshal new, specialized medical and aerospace technologies, in the belief that they can overcome the perils of a feat untried since the 1960s. "There's been an evolutionary improvement in every technical aspect of the jump," says Watson. "We have a better understanding than we've ever had of the physiology we have to support and of the environment we have to deal with."

In a quest like this, technology and the money to buy it are just as important as courage, and this race will ultimately be won by cash - to pay for R&D, personnel, equipment, and logistics. Although both StratoQuest and Space Dive started out blaring their intentions decisively, both have foundered some, moving back their initially promised launch dates by several months. Stearns figures she'll need $6.5 million - which she doesn't have. Millner doesn't float a total cost and won't say how much he's gathered, but neither challenger appears to have landed a major sponsor, and both have yet to commission a space suit. The one certain advantage in the race is Millner's procurement of a launch site: The Balloon Launching Station in Alice Springs, a town in the desolate Australian outback. The director of Australia's foremost balloon-launching facility has signed on to the Millner project, and his access to equipment and time at the base are likely to give Millner a significant boost. With the addition of four organizational gurus from the 2000 Sydney Olympics to the crew, the Australians' slight edge over StratoQuest gets wider. Space Dive, at least, has a decent chance of surviving. But does Millner?

He certainly seems ready to roll. A 37-year-old affable ex-commando with two-tone hair, Millner is a danger-is-my-business careerist. A former martial arts competitor, speedboat driver, and film student who now makes a living in real estate, he has only 400 skydives to his credit, a number that barely constitutes fifth grade in this field. But he radiates confidence. "I love the idea of the impossible becoming possible," he tells me when we first meet at his publicist's office in Sydney. "I don't believe there's anything that can't be done."

Millner's flack, Greg Campbell, plays a cassette of Millner getting hazed by AM radio jocks who yuk it up imagining his grisly demise: They could open your helmet on the ground and see nothing but pasta fazoul!

Millner laughs. He's unfazed.

Another host asks: How does a parachute stop you without ripping your head off?

That's a very good question, mate.

One woman demands to know why he's bothering with this crazy stunt.

He responds reflexively: Because it can be done.

Maybe, but his cockiness belies the project's complicated vision. To entice potential sponsors, advertisers, and networks, the Space Dive team has to exude utter certainty, even though the whole thing is a terrifying gamble. It's just as well to keep that part under wraps, though. Because no benefactor should think Millner is organizing an elaborate suicide.

Millner's 25-mile-high journey will take two and half hours up and ten minutes down. As he skydives, he should reach a terminal velocity of 1,000 mph before Earth's atmosphere thickens, slowing him to 125 mph at about 5,000 feet - at which point he'll deploy his canopy. Up and down, he'll pass through a range of hostile environments that require a constant oxygen supply. In the stratosphere - the region of the atmosphere from roughly 158,000 feet to 36,000 feet - it will warm to a high of about zero. Farther down, in the tropopause, a narrow band across the top of the troposphere, the temperature can dip to -80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ravi Sood, an expert in astrophysics, is the director of the Alice Springs facility, which means that when Space Dive secured the site for their launch, they got Sood as part of the package. The slightly stooped Kenyan Indian is also the chair of the physics department at the University of South Wales, located within the campus of the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. He teaches cadets about space.

"For our purposes, we'll use stratospheric balloons because the maximum height a plane can go, even a spy plane, is around 80,000 feet," Sood explains, sitting in his boundless ground-floor lab, where he spends most of his time working amid shelves of communications equipment for balloon projects. "Because the density of air is so low," he continues, "you need an extremely large volume of balloon."

Indeed, a very large envelope is needed to take Millner up. Millner, his gear, and the gondola will together weigh close to 1,000 pounds. Lifting this will require a 12 million-cubic-foot helium balloon stitched out of some 258,000 square feet of polyethylene - the thin, durable material that brought us sandwich Baggies. The open gondola, not much larger than Millner himself, will be built with Styrofoam and aluminum.

The greatest risk to the balloon comes on the ground, where a big gust could rip apart the polyethylene. To avoid this disaster, Sood will monitor the barometric conditions days in advance. If it's too windy, he'll call off the launch.

Generally, however, Sood rules out a mishap on his watch. The balloon is controlled from the ground by radio, and at any moment Sood can drop ballast - the 300-pound freight of steel or glass shards that the balloon unloads to gain speed or altitude. Or he can immediately deflate the balloon and open a parachute for the gondola, which is what he'll do once Millner jumps. If for some reason the automation breaks down, Millner will take the helm himself. "We do this kind of launch for astrophysics research routinely," Sood explains. "In this case, the payload is just different."

Someone, of course, must ensure that the payload doesn't die. Dougal Watson, an expert in aerospace medicine, has been working out this problem - gratis. Hale and ruddy, Watson is a pilot, skydiver, deep-sea diver, mountain climber, and Fellow with the Aerospace Medical Association. He lives in a Victorian house just outside Adelaide, and his living room, devoid of furniture and cluttered with files, has the signature decor of an overachieving workaholic.

Watson was thrilled when he was asked to join the team. "My first reaction was, 'I hope they're going to ask me to jump,'" he recalls. But it's his experience in high-altitude classified medical research that got him the job.

As the team's medical lead, Watson has to concern himself with some rather gothic scenarios. If Millner doesn't take in enough oxygen, he could suffer from hypoxia - a condition in which a lack of oxygen flow to tissue can cause motor dysfunction and unconsciousness. The change in oxygen flow will also affect Millner's body fluids. As altitude increases, atmospheric pressure decreases, and along with it the boiling point of liquid. So if Millner's suit isn't pressurized properly, his body will swell to twice its normal size, and his blood will stop circulating.

Watson will have to protect Millner from the altitude's vicious cold as well as the sun's searing heat - a dichotomy of environments that could fog his visor or leave his hands numb. "We're going to look at shielding the incoming solar radiation and balancing it against what will be very cold conditions," Watson explains. He'll also have to devise a system for filtering the carbon dioxide produced by Millner's exhalations: Otherwise, his own breath could make him swoon.

To prevent a physiological catastrophe, the skydiver's suit will have its own biomedical telemetry system. Millner will have automatic pressure and temperature support. His core body temperature, skin temperature, respiration rate, arterial oxygen saturation, and heart rate will constantly be monitored and transmitted digitally to a receiver on the ground. Watson will have an automatic response system in place, so that if, for instance, the jumper's blood oxygen count is down, the system can compensate. Data on other vital concerns, like heart rate, will also be transmitted back to Earth. "It's simple," Watson says. "In the case of an ECG - an electrocardiograph - all we'd need to do is interface a miniaturized ECG sensor with an adapted radio transmitter."

The existing skydive record is 83,500 feet - less than two-thirds as high as Millner wants to go - and it was set 40 years ago by a Soviet cosmonaut. The last serious attempt to break it occurred in 1966. That jumper's pressurization system failed in an accident whose cause remains mysterious. He slipped into an irreversible coma while drifting slowly down.

After that ... well, the world just sort of lost interest in human exploration of the stratosphere, mainly because the space program made the thin air between Earth and orbit seem like an irrelevant fly-through zone. Things were different in the '50s and '60s. In the prespace era, US Air Force scientists and pilots tested the limits of their bodies in the stratosphere. Colonel John Paul Stapp, the godfather of all stratosphere aeronauts, used his own body as a flying laboratory, testing how much punishment it could endure at extreme speeds and high altitudes without oxygen, evaluating the parameters of pain in rocket sleds and B-17s.

Another space pioneer, a German physician and aviator named Hubertus Strughold, had recently established that above 50,000 feet a man would instantaneously black out without supplemental oxygen. Stapp himself flew an unheated, unpressurized version of the B-17 to monitor his physical responses, a flight that yielded a crucial discovery for space travel: the value of "prebreathing." If you suck in 100 percent oxygen for at least 30 minutes before takeoff, he discovered, you'll purge nitrogen from the body and avoid getting the bends at altitude.

As scientists continued gathering facts about high-altitude aviation, they also examined ancillary problems - like, what would happen if a pilot ejected from his craft? In 1960, an Air Force test pilot named Joe Kittinger Jr. generated some conclusions. Kittinger leaped from 102,800 feet (19.5 miles above sea level), his third successful high-altitude dive from the stratosphere, and still the highest jump attempted to date. His project, known as Excelsior III, was deemed a triumph - President Eisenhower awarded Kittinger a medal - but officials from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the sanctioning body for such records, didn't recognize Kittinger's feat because he didn't have an official observer to document the fall.

Skydiver Nicholas Piantanida tried to break Kittinger's unofficial record three times, beginning in 1965. On the first attempt, a 6-knot wind decapitated his balloon at 22,700 feet. On his second attempt, Piantanida couldn't disconnect from his onboard oxygen.

The circumstances of Piantanida's third and fatal attempt remain baffling. He was still on his way up at 57,600 feet when ground control staff heard a scream and then a monstrous gush of air come through their monitors. Piantanida had lost pressure at 11 miles high. One theory is that he may not have prebreathed sufficiently before taking off, later causing him to struggle for breath, panic, and open his visor. If so, "it was basically suicide," speculates his daughter, Diane Shearin, "like crossing a desert with one canteen."

If anything will spoil this extreme research project, it's the protective suit. Millner and Stearns will probably use the same type of suits worn by shuttle astronauts. But a skydiver's body positioning is completely different from that of an astronaut, which is slightly hunched, relaxed, and upright. In contrast, the aeronaut will most likely be facedown, with belly out, shoulders and arms thrust back, and legs spread - what skydivers call the shuttlecock position. No suit is flexible enough to accommodate this posture. Plus, heavy gear that's easy to lift in conditions of microgravity will be a hindrance for someone trying to jump out of a gondola.

A repurposed suit will also have to defend the diver from the unsparing conditions of the jump. Flying into the stratosphere at 1,000 mph requires what's called "constant volume articulation." An ordinary space suit will bend at the joints much like a bellows or accordion, maintaining pressure around an astronaut's elbows and knees. In the benign environment inside a spaceship, the slow folding and expanding of such joints might not be an impediment, but when a skydiver at 130,000 feet is scrambling to establish his or her position, more rapid volume articulation is crucial. If there's too much resistance in the suit, a skydiver will lose dexterity and go into a spin.

This kind of tweaking costs money; even a "standard" full-pressure suit runs to $3 million. Per Lindstrand, a respected balloon supplier based in England who provided equipment and logistics for Richard Branson's attempt to ring the globe, explains that the sheer expense stops most people from a record-breaking jump. "Fourteen, fifteen teams have approached me in the past," he says, "but they're only paper attempts. I always ask them about a sponsor."

Meanwhile, bundles of money are required to cover the high-altitude balloon - which can run to more than $100,000 - plus training and planning expenses. For about $2,000 an hour, teams may be able to rent wind tunnels to test the effects of high-velocity pressure on scaled-down dummies. (Wind tunnels that allow human testing reach only 200 mph.) And the jumpers will have to log hours of expensive diving time. Millner plans to perform 600 practice jumps, costing an additional $20,000. "A lot of people ask me, 'Why don't you do it?'" says Tad Smith, a veteran skydiver whose highest jump is from 37,500 feet. "Frankly, it's a matter of money."

Even when the problems of suit design and funding are solved, there remains one more wild card in this adventure: the sound barrier. "No one knows exactly what the effects of Mach 1 would be," says retired Air Force aerospace physiologist Joseph Zellers. "The way a pressure suit is designed to function is based on the altitude you're exposed to, not the speed you encounter on the way down."

Today, Joe Kittinger insists that he reached Mach speed - just barely - during his Excelsior III jump and that he felt no pressure waves run through his body. But Craig Ryan, historian and author of The Pre-Astronauts, points out that the press at the time - as well as Kittinger's own book The Long Lonely Leap - reported a top speed of 614 mph, which is subsonic. The truth about the colonel's feat, says Ryan, "is a mystery that will never be determined."

Still, it's possible that Kittinger did hit the 714 mph he claims, and that nothing happened. The small size of the human body and the reduced resistance at 130,000 feet might together mitigate any disastrous effects of going transonic. Watson believes that traveling at 1,000 mph in the stratosphere will feel pretty much like going 120 mph further down - that is, very windy, but far from lethal. Yet no real evidence exists indicating how Millner or Stearns will fare at the speed of sound; so far, it's all conjecture. "You're in virgin territory here," says Zellers.

Cheryl Stearns has won 21 US skydiving championships and has made 14,000 jumps in her career. At 46, she holds a master's degree in aeronautical science and was the first female admitted to the US Army's elite parachute group, the Golden Knights. In 1995, she jumped 352 times in a single day, shattering her own Guinness world record. On paper, Stearns is better qualified than her rival Down Under.

Yet so far her project hasn't mushroomed. The Discovery Channel has agreed to film a documentary on Stearns and to air the jump, but the NBC-owned company didn't have to pay anything to buy the rights. And according to Lindstrand, who's providing technical support, funding is thin.

I visited Stearns in her tidy ranch home near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. As we talked, 11 cats came in and out of her patio, which leads to a 6-acre pine forest. Small and sinewy with curly hair, Stearns possesses the conflicting characteristics that may be a prerequisite for considering a jump like this: wild defiance coupled with unusual fastidiousness.

For the past 27 years, Stearns has been training at a small airfield outside of town. One morning I accompanied her there to watch her practice by jumping nearly a dozen times. Every time she landed, her sheltie ambled over from the snack bar area to the field to watch Stearns pack her chute. After one jump, the three of us walked back to a picnic table near the clubhouse, where I ask if she has ever feared for her life. "It's there," she said. "It's a little thing on my shoulder that keeps me from doing stupid things."

Stearns and Millner are similar in several ways. Both have military pedigrees. Both dislike being called daredevils. To them, that's like calling a chef a short-order cook. "Evel Knievel's an idiot," Millner told me at one point. "Why go at it alone and take all those chances with your life?" Later he insisted on qualifying his comments about the notorious motorcycle stuntman: "Evel Knievel would develop an idea without scientific preparation. But I think differently: How can I do this and live?"

Yet Millner is more dynamic and unpredictable than the tenacious, literal Stearns, and his ideas about the world aren't entirely straightforward. He's a soldier and a vegetarian. He taught the deployment of land mines but wants some of Space Dive's proceeds to go to anti-land-mine programs. He'll pray on the way up in his balloon, but he isn't much of a churchgoer.

Raised in a middle-class suburb of Sydney, Millner was a small, skinny kid subject to bullying. When he was 12, his mother fell ill with lupus, and her condition worsened until she was hospitalized for good. Millner, at 17, dropped out of school and started to flounder.

At this point he met Walt Missingham, the owner of a martial arts studio where Millner wanted to train. "We rejected him," Missingham says. According to Missingham, Millner wasn't disciplined, and it took several attempts at the studio for the young man to "develop into a competitor." But within two years of starting training, Millner reached the national championship. Bolstered by this, he joined the Defence Force's commando training school. Nine months after joining, he graduated to the special forces and was later made a lieutenant in the infantry.

To pay the bills while serving in the military, Millner took odd jobs as a bouncer, a bodyguard, and a savings-bond salesman. Then, in 1999, Richard Branson's best-selling autobiography, Losing My Virginity, gave him his most adventurous idea yet. Branson, CEO of Virgin, made the argument that flying around the world in a balloon was the only high-altitude challenge left. The exacting Millner didn't buy it. He tracked down the tale of Joe Kittinger Jr., the US Air Force test pilot who jumped from 102,800 feet and survived.

Inspired, Millner called on his old mentor Missingham, who had turned to making documentary films and pitched his friend the concept: Millner takes a dive, Missingham takes pictures. "I can work with that," said Missingham.

Over dinner one night, Millner tells me he's the kind of guy who likes to examine how things run and improve them. I've noticed that already. An amicable nitpicker, he already nailed me on a nervous tic, and just a day earlier, he enumerated the mistakes in Saving Private Ryan, beginning with the famous beach scene, in which Tom Hanks' character puts a plastic bag over his machine gun. The story, Millner, informs me, takes place before the plastic bag was invented.

This finicky attention to detail, a trait Millner shares with Stearns ("Respect a sport, respect your equipment, and respect your judgment" is how Stearns puts it), might just save him. If care, thoroughness, and state-of-the-art technology are what's necessary to get a person back to Earth safely from 25 miles up, either Millner or Stearns - whoever gets up there first - could have the thing in the bag.

Of course, if they reach Mach speed and spin out, all the forethought in the world can't help. "I won't be able to do much at that point," concedes Space Dive's Dougal Watson. "Once you step out of the balloon," adds skydiving veteran Tad Smith, "it's theory."

Of course, once you hit pure theory, that's when the defiance kicks in.